Tech Field Day News Rundown

Apple has quietly added a new "Lockdown Mode" to iOS 16, iPadOS16, and macOS Ventura that allows users to restrict the channels often used by the most intrusive exploits and hacks. It's designed to protect journalists, dissidents, and others at risk of state-sponsored snooping. This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for shownotes.   Time Stamps:   0:00 - Welcome to t...

NIST has announced their selections for quantum-safe encryption algorithms. The competition has been running since 2016 when the standards body realized that quantum computing could potentially impact RSA-based public key encryption. The new encryption method, CRYSTALS-Kyber, as well as digital signature methods named CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+, are designed to be implemented in the...

The artificial intelligence community is buzzing about the just-released ML Commons MLPerf Training v2.0 results, which were announced today. NVIDIA, Intel Habana, Google, and Graphcore all submitted at least partial results, and everyone is crowing about their performance. NVIDIA is the only one to cover the field, and has a strong showing despite still relying on their A100 GPUs. Intel's Habana...

The last two weeks have been filled with conferences. RSA happened June 6-9 and Cisco Live was June 12-16. There were also gatherings for Splunk, Juniper, and others around the same time in San Francisco and Las Vegas. While the general mood of the conferences seemed to be focused on how good it was to get people back in person the reality of what that looks like a world still affected by a global...

Pure Storage held their annual Accelerate event in Los Angeles last week. The key new introduction was the next generation of their FlashBlade scale-out storage solution. They claim that it is "disaggregated" because CPU and storage can be mixed and matched, and that it scales past a petabyte. Pure also went GA with Portworx Data Services, which brings the company into the market for database as a...

IBM finally lost a court case this week and nows owes BMC $1.6 billion. Why? Well, the reasoning is that IBM stole one of BMC's biggest customers - AT&T. IBM had been providing service on behalf of BMC for a number of years and had a very specific agreement that they wouldn't try to convince BMC customers to go directly to IBM. In this particular case BMC says that IBM violated that agreement...

Intel has some new codenames in the works for their high performance computing lines. The new AI GPU is code named Rialto Bridge and the next generation flexible architecure past 2023 will be Falcon Shores. The Falcon Shores lineup continues the chiplet idea, with x86 and Xe cores mated together to create a very configurable solution somewhat akin to the Apple M1 with CPU and GPU running together...

The biggest shock to the virtualization community in months hit this past weekend when the press noted that chip giant Broadcom is in talks to purchase VMware. The former stepchild of Dell and EMC was spun off less than a year ago into a separate company. The news mentioned that Broadcom has been looking to expand their software portfolio and VMware would join CA and Symantec in the Broadcom suite...

Intel is ready to ramp up the market for add-on cards. Their roadmap for Infrastructure Processing Units, which is what Intel calls a DPU, are focusing on a combination of ASICs and FPGAs. The ASIC model is a high-performance unit with very specific uses. The FPGA model is more programmable at the cost of peak output. The road map also lays out the future of Intel's plans for the next three years,...

Dell Technologies World happened last week and while the response online was somewhat muted compared to years past, there was one thing that stood out to several analysts in the audience. Per an article from Chris Mellor, some of the spotlight fell on Chuck Whitten, the current COO of Dell and the person that many have tapped as the heir-apparent to Michael Dell. Dell is in much better shape today...

Although Dell skipped inviting influencers to Dell Tech World this year, the company announced that they are expanding their APEX on-premises and public cloud cyber resilience services with a partnership with Snowflake. They also upgraded their PowerMax, PowerStore, and PowerScale storage offerings and PowerFlex HCI solution. Dell is also ramping up Project Alpine, which would follow competitors l...

Vice got their hands on a leaked memo from Facebook that sheds light on some troubling privacy issues on the platform. Per the memo, Facebook is worried about the growing number of user privacy regulations around the world because the company cannot say where the user data they collect goes exactly or what the companies that collect it are doing with it. Facebook admits the problem is that the sys...

It appears just when you think you’re muted you’re really not!? Some individuals found that a ton of popular video conferencing apps fail to disable device microphones & these apps have the ability to access audio data. So Stephen how do you feel knowing that Skynet could be listening to what were saying!? All this and more on this week's Rundown. For show notes, head over to http://www.gestal...

It's been a very busy week for companies getting acquired! We thought it would be best to collect them all together so we could give you a quick overview of what this means for the companies involved. This and more on this week's Rundown. For show notes and more, head to http://www.gestaltit.com/

Fresh off an appearance on stage during Aruba Atmosphere, Pensando is now off the market thanks to AMD. The other big chipmaker in the space is picking up the DPU maker for $1.9 billion. The move is designed to compete directly against NVIDIA's Bluefield DPU offerings as well as Intel's nacent IPU solution. In addition, this allows them to broaden their horizons as a maker of more than just CPUs a...

Aruba introduced location-aware Wi-Fi access points for precise indoor location and is partnering with third parties like Tile to create a new OpenLocate service. We discuss these stories and more on this week’s Rundown. For show notes please visit https://gestaltit.com/

Jensen Huang is back with another NVIDIA GTC keynote, launching the next-generation Hopper GPU architecture and a raft of new products for cloud, HPC, datacenter, automotive, and beyond. We discuss this story and more on this week's Rundown. For show notes please visit: https://gestaltit.com/

In a new directive from the US Congress, companies that are critical to the national interest will face new rules about whether or not they have been hacked or paid to remove ransomware. We discuss this story and more on this week's Rundown.   For show notes please visit: https://gestaltit.com/

With the world focused on the situation between Ukraine and Russia it's hard to keep up with the pace of news. One thing that has stood out from the tech side is the number of tech companies that have severed business ties with Russia as a form of dissent or punishment for their actions on the world stage. We discuss this story and more on this week's Rundown.   For show notes please visit: h...

World news is very busy this week with stories focusing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One of the biggest news items is that many of the countries in the western world are using economic sanctions to show their distaste for the military moves being made. Is cryptocurrency a way to stymie the sanctioning used to avoid all-out war? We discuss this story and more on this week's Rundown.   F...

An interesting proposal appeared this week in an article penned by Chris Inglis, US National Cyber Director, and Harry Krejsa. In it, a suggestion is made for a new cyber social contract to help build trust and security with the public. We discuss this story and more in this week's Rundown.  For show. notes please visit: https://gestaltit.com/

Friday afternoon saw a huge breaking announcement from the Wall Street Journal. Reports indicated that Cisco had made a $20 billion offer to acquire Splunk.  We discus this story and more on this week's Rundown. Special guest host Girard Kavelines joins us today. You can follow him on twitter at @GKavelines. For show notes please visit: https://gestaltit.com/

NVIDIA announced that they are finally dropping their plans to acquire chip maker ARM. The final nail in the coffin comes with a steep price tag, as ARM and SoftBank are entitled to keep up to $2 billion in fees paid at the outset of the deal. We discuss this story and more on this week's Rundown. For show notes please visit: https://gestaltit.com/

Last week saw quarterly financial announcements from both Intel (Jan 26) and AMD (Feb 1) that help us see where things are going, at least in the short term. And Chinese regulators have finally approved the AMD deal to purchase Xilinx. We discuss these stories and more on this week's Rundown.   For show notes please visit:https://gestaltit.com/

It's official! Intel's "Mega-Site" in New Albany, Ohio will house a massive chip fab, Intel's first all-new chipmaking facility in 40 years. NVIDIA's planned takeover of chip rights company ARM looks to be off. Stephen and special guest host, Chris Grundemann, discuss these stories and more on this week's Rundown.  For show notes please visit: https://gestaltit.com/